Editorial: Introduction to the 38th Annual Gallery of Fluid Motion (Chicago, IL, USA 2020)
David H. Richter, Saverio E. Spagnolie · Physical Review Fluids · 2021
The year 2020 was an abnormal year in many respects, and the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics was no exception.Originally slated to be held in Chicago, IL from November 22-24, 2020, it was instead held entirely online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.Despite this interruption, including the necessary modifications to the overall conference program as it was shifted to a virtual format, the annual Gallery of Fluid Motion (GFM) was conducted as usual and suffered no shortage of compelling submissions.A number of submissions even spoke directly to the prominent challenge of COVID-19, bringing a fluid dynamics perspective to the task of better understanding and disrupting its spread.The general timeline of GFM submissions was kept the same, requiring contributors to begin the submission process by September 16, 2020 to signal their intent, with final entries due by October 12, 2020.Ultimately, 60 video and 17 poster entries were submitted from 19 different countriesnumbers similar to previous, in-person meetings, speaking to the substantial robustness of the field as a whole.The virtual format's primary impact on the Gallery was naturally that there was no hall in which to display the poster and video entries.But the GFM website hosted by APS was set up as usual, where entries not only from 2020 but from previous years can still be viewed (https://gfm.aps.org).As in past years, two panels were organized to judge the GFM entries, one for videos and one for posters.The video panel consisted of seven experts in the broad field of fluid mechanics and the poster panel consisted of three experts, and were led by the authors, respectively.Each entry was scored on a scale of 1-5.After a preliminary round of voting, an additional "finals" round was conducted to establish both the overall GFM winners as well as the Milton van Dyke Awards.The judging assignments were randomized and potential conflicts of interest were proactively avoided.Below, we report the winners of the 2020 GFM competition (see also Fig. 1).The top three entries from each category were awarded the Milton van Dyke Award, which comes with a cash prize.Following this, the next three video entries were deemed GFM winners.Our congratulations to the winners!And we both congratulate and extend our gratitude to all the contributors for continuing in the strong tradition of making fluid mechanics informative, relevant, and visually stunning to a wide audience.